I'm trying to serve protected files using this directive in my nginx.conf:

    location /secure/ {
        internal;
        alias   /home/ldr/webapps/nginx/app/secure/;
    }

I'm passing in paths in the form: "/myfile.doc"

and the file's path would be: /home/ldr/webapps/nginx/app/secure/myfile.doc

I just get 404's when I access "http: //myserver/secure/myfile.doc" (space inserted after http to stop ServerFault converting it to a link)

I've tried taking the trailing / off the location directive and that makes no difference.

Two questions:

1. How do I fix it!
2. How can I debug problems like this myself? How can I get Nginx to report which path it's looking for? error.log shows nothing and access.log just tells me which url is being requested - this is the bit I already know! It's no fun trying things randomly without any feedback.

Here's my entire nginx.conf:

    daemon off;
    worker_processes 2;
    events {
        worker_connections 1024;
    }
    http {
        include             mime.types;
        default_type        application/octet-stream; 
        server {
            listen  21534;
            server_name my.server.com;
            client_max_body_size 5m;
            location /media/ {
                alias /home/ldr/webapps/nginx/app/media/;
            }
            location / {
                proxy_set_header            X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header             X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                fastcgi_pass                unix:/home/ldr/webapps/nginx/app/myproject/django.sock;
                fastcgi_pass_header          Authorization;          
                fastcgi_hide_header          X-Accel-Redirect;
                fastcgi_hide_header          X-Sendfile;
                fastcgi_intercept_errors     off;
                include                        fastcgi_params;
            }
            location /secure {
                internal;
                alias   /home/ldr/webapps/nginx/app/secure/;
            }
        }
    }

EDIT:

I'm trying some of the suggestions here

So I've tried:

location /secure/ {
    internal;
    alias   /home/ldr/webapps/nginx/app/;
}

both with and without the trailing slash on location.

I've also tried moving this block before the "location /" directive.

The page I linked to has ^~ after 'location' giving:

location ^~ /secure/ { ...etc...

Not sure what that signifies but it didn't work either!